


Bad Life Choices

by Cuits



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-16
Updated: 2015-04-16
Packaged: 2018-03-23 05:50:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3756832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cuits/pseuds/Cuits
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Claire has made her fair share of bad life choices. She still doesn't consider helping him out of that dumpster as a bad life choice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bad Life Choices

Claire has made her fair share of bad life choices. One doesn’t live her whole life in Hell’s Kitchen and survives to tell it without at least half a dozen of those. That time he hooked up with Bobby Robbinson? Bad life choice. The summer before college in which she dyed her hair blonde? Definitely bad life choice. Studying to become a nurse?  Well, she is waiting till the end of her third consecutive shift to decide about that one.

 

She is on her last hour when the injured start coming, they are all in pretty bad shape and they all come speaking gibberish about the Daredevil.  She attends them under the careful eyes of a couple of officers that have come to make the arrests as soon as medically possible.

 

She pays special attention to their knuckles and tries to predict the kind of injuries they might have inflicted him.

 

When she finishes patching them up and finally her last shift is over she pays a visit to the supplies room and picks up some extra suture kits and bandages, just to be safe, before heading home with that other cell phone of hers secured in the pocket of her trousers where she is sure she will hear if it rings — when it rings.

 

She carries it with her to the bathroom when she showers and has it on the table while she eats some dinner. An hour later she is in bed, quickly falling asleep, the device gripped in her hand, silent. She tells herself that she is relieved and not dissapointed at all.

 

She still doesn't consider helping him out of that dumpster as a bad life choice.

 

\-------------------

 

He calls her the next morning.

 

She puts on some yoga pants and a hoody and is headed out of her apartment before even having taken a single sip of coffee. His apartment is not that far away, and she tells herself she needs the exercise to be fully awake before starting to use sharp and pointy instruments on another human being.

 

“You ran here,” he says smiling when he opens the door for her, shirtless and looking exactly the opposite as she feels.

 

“Yes.” And it doesn’t occur to her until that moment that he can smell her sweat, that maybe she stinks to his delicate sense of smell.

 

“Are you… embarrassed?”

 

“No. Yes. Well, I mean… what can I do for you?”

 

He has a bad laceration on his right scapula but his torso is not completely covered with bruises. No puncture wounds or life threatening head wounds either, it certainly is an improvement.

 

The place is quiet and calm to her senses as the needle pierces his skin time and time again.

 

“So, this new suit, how is it working out for you?”

 

“It itches,” he says, his voice steady and a little teasing as if he had been expecting the question which is probably the truth.

 

“Well, I’d take itchiness over stab wound any day.”

 

“I don’t know… it really itches.”

 

Claire smiles and she knows he hears it. She wonders sometimes what else does he hear about her, how much does he tune in to her tellings. She ties the knot, cuts the thread and disposes of her gloves in a swift movement. Matt turns himself around on the couch and looks at her general direction but his distant gaze doesn’t fix on her, it never does; it should be unsettling but somehow is not.

 

“Do you want a cup of coffee?”

 

He smiles. That sweet calm smile of his that has girls falling for him at the speed of light and Claire sighs and agrees because the promise of caffeine and his quiet smile is just too tempting to even think about rejecting it.

 

He turns on the coffee maker and puts on a hoody with a similar shade of grey to the one she is currently wearing and she wonders if he can somehow sense colours, despite telling her once that he saw the whole world in flames.

 

When the coffee is ready they sit side by side at the counter and drink their coffee in silence.

 

He can hear the world. She can only hear his soothing breathing and feels it deep, deep in her bones in a way that makes her realize she could make a lot of really bad life choices for this boy.

 

\---------------------------

 

It's the chronicle of a death foretold, really. Her mother used to tell her never fall in love with someone whose heart was already occupied by somebody else. She told her that every night, like a bedtime story, and Claire had thought that she was out of that rebellious phase of contradicting her mother for quite sometime bow.

 

It seems she was wrong.

 

“I brought you coffee,” he says, “to thank you for sending clients our way on top of everything else.”

 

He is waiting for her outside the hospital doors, dressed in a grey suit and a black tie, a warm cup of coffee in one hand and his white cane on the other. He looks like they could built a campaign ad around him, with his good looks and his dashing, warm smile and claire thinks that she could have fallen in love with this incorruptible, indefatigable lawyer all the same.

 

“I’m not really sure I am making you guys any favors,” she says taking the coffee. “Half of those clients can’t even pay you for your services.”

 

“Hey, a client is a client nevertheless.” And there it is that smile again.

 

Claire takes a deep breath and shakes her head lightly to herself. She should be smarter than this, she is supposed to be smarter than this.

 

“I was on my way home.”

 

“Can I walk with you?”

 

This is what she should do: she should say no, go home, take a long, hot shower, drink half a bottle of whisky and get herself under the covers, sleep and make herself believe that she can make herself not to be in love with this man.

 

“Yes, sure,” she says instead.

 

They walk at a slow pace across the city, almost dragging their feet with each step as the traffic runs madly around them and she sees it in his demeanor, a kind of complacent attitude that wasn’t there before.

 

“You look good,” she comments affectionately.

 

His grin is bright and contagious. “Yeah, everything has been good recently.” And then he stops her with a hand on her arm, turning so she can see his face like she wasn't looking at him before. “I know you said you didn’t want… anything, but I don’t have that many friends, I have even less that really know me and I just wanted to spend some time with you.”

 

Her heartbeat speeds up as she says, “It’s alright,” but her voice sounds a little unconvinced and neither of them start to walk again.

 

“Do you want me to go?” he asks suddenly, which sounds preposterous to her ears.

 

“I’m pretty sure you know I don’t.” He must surely have picked up on her breathing when he first touched her arm.

 

“I know different people make different choices based on the same parameters.  I’ve always respect the voice of that choices.” There is not a trace of his smile now but his features look too gentle for his own good. “Do you want me to go?”

 

“No,” she says.

 

They keep walking down the street as he quietly asks her about her work and she can still see it in him, in the way he talks about his day, his utter, unconditional, everlasting love for this city.

 

Claire is starting to consider the difference between bad and good is not as precise and defined as she once thought.

 

\---------------

 

It’s raining outside and the big, luminous windows of his apartment are all covered in drop trails that don’t stop moving. It’s a little poetic, the way it distorts the rest of the world and cocoons them into thinking that they are all that remains is sharp and clear.

 

She has come just to apply a couple of stitches to a cut behind his left ear that is the smallest, most unthreatening wound she has ever attended to on him. It feels like an excuse and like it’s not excuse enough, all at the same time, but they both sit on the couch and the city is grey and slow and she is not sure it matters anymore.

 

“I met Karen today,” she says. She had gone to Nelson and Murdock with a neighbor who has been having legal issues with her tennant. Matt was nowhere to be seen but the young girl had been eager to help them nevertheless.

 

Matt makes a noncommittal gesture that she isn’t sure how to interpret so she keeps talking as he listens to everything he always listens to in addition to her.

 

“She is a really nice girl, so pretty, and kind,” she continues and waits for him to say something to that.

 

There is a refreshing kind of freedom in their lack of pretenses. She can’t put on a mask to hide from him so she doesn’t try and he never judges her in return. There is an unspoken agreement between them to talk with the truth and this level of exposure should be terrifying but instead she feels strangely safe and vindicated in his presence.

 

The liberation of being only herself, she guesses.

 

“Foggy seems to think that too,” he says evasively.

 

“And you don’t?”

 

“I do. It’s just that — there is this strain in her voice that doesn’t sound quite right.”

 

Claire sighs and wonders, not for the first time, what does he hear when he listens to her.

 

“She is hopelessly in love with you,” she says with a tingle of sad camaraderie.

 

He takes a deep, deep breath before speaking again.

 

“She is hopelessly in love with an idea of me," he says matter of factly. "I can sense it. Her eagerness for someone fundamentally good, her desperation for a happy ending. It feels angry red and suffocating." His blank gaze fixes on her as if he were really watching her and leans a little bit into her. "There is a devil inside the Murdock boys. I'll never live up to her standards anyway."

 

She chuckles and looks out of the window into the blurry world outside.

 

"You are a honest, intelligent lawyer and a justice driven, ninja style hero. I'd say you meet pretty much everyone realistic standards."

 

"Not yours."

 

It’s the longing in his voice what makes her look back at him. Slowly, she lifts her hand to caress his cheek and the way he closes his eyes and leans into her touch is a little too much for her resolve.

 

She closes the distance between them and kisses him. Her other hand travels to his hair and entangles her fingers there, careful to avoid the cut behind his ear. His lips are warm and soft as she kisses her with purposeful slowness.

 

"How do I sound when you listen to me?" she asks against his mouth, her curiosity getting the best of her.

 

Matt smiles broadly against her lips and nibbles lightly her upper lip before answering.

 

“You sound like a warm, sunny day on the park,” he says caressing her cheeks with his thumbs.

 

His hair is soft. Softer than any other she has touched before and he kisses her exactly as she never knew she wanted to be kissed.

 

Her skin warms up and her breathing becomes erratic and elaborated as her heartbeat races up.

  
He looks exactly like her next bad choice.


End file.
